Tag Archives | Rituals

For the Incas, coca and alcohol served simultaneously as keys to the sacred and tools of coercion and control, National Geographic fascinatingly reports:

The bodies of 13-year-old Llullaillaco Maiden and her younger companions Llullaillaco Boy and Lightning Girl (three Inca mummies found near the lofty summit of Volcán Llullaillaco in Argentina) have revealed that mind-altering substances played a part in their deaths and during the year-long series of ceremonial processes that prepared them for their final hours.

Under biochemical analysis, the Maiden’s hair yielded a record of what she ate and drank during the last two years of her life. This evidence seems to support historical accounts of a few selected children taking part in a year of sacred ceremonies—marked in their hair by changes in food, coca, and alcohol consumption—that would ultimately lead to their sacrifice.

Her surging consumption of both coca and alcohol, which were then controlled substances not available for everyday use, show she appears to have been selected for sacrifice a year before her actual death: “We suspect the Maiden was one of the acllas, or chosen women, selected around the time of puberty to live away from her familiar society under the guidance of priestesses.”

This incredibly disturbing saga harkens back to the heyday of heavy metal moral panic. Via the Los Angeles Times:

Prosecutors say that Moises Meraz-Espinoza strangled his mother and then skinned, filleted and dismembered her body as part of a satanic ritual. The woman’s internal organs were never recovered. A Norwalk jury convicted him of first-degree murder in June.

Deputy Dist. Atty. Heba Matta, said Meraz-Espinoza was motivated by satanic beliefs, which he was “heavily entrenched in.” His mother disapproved of his listening to death metal music and he regularly disobeyed her, Matta said.

“This crime was not in the heat of passion or rash and impulsive,” Matta said. “It was done for the purpose of devotion. That’s pretty much the ultimate sacrifice.”

Meraz-Espinoza has numerous tattoos that draw on satanic imagery, such as upside-down crosses and a 666 behind his right ear. Authorities recovered his copy of a satanic bible near the crime scene.

Rituals take an extraordinary array of shapes and forms. At times performed in communal or religious settings, at times performed in solitude; at times involving fixed, repeated sequences of actions, at other times not. People engage in rituals with the intention of achieving a wide set of desired outcomes, from reducing their anxiety to boosting their confidence, performing well in a competition – or even making it rain.

Recent research suggests that rituals may be more rational than they appear. Why? Because even simple rituals can be extremely effective. Rituals performed after experiencing losses do alleviate grief, and rituals performed before high-pressure tasks do in fact reduce anxiety and increase people’s confidence. What’s more, rituals appear to benefit even people who claim not to believe that rituals work.

Humans feel uncertain and anxious in a host of situations. In the late 1940s, anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski suggested that people are more likely to turn to rituals when they face situations where the outcome is important and uncertain and beyond their control.

On the French isle of Corsica, the chilling prehistoric occult practice of dream hunting, performed by psychically-gifted individuals called mazzeri, is still done by a small number today. Drawing from descriptions by anthropologist Dorothy Carrington, TerraCorsa reveals:

The activities of the mazzeri stem from the Corsican hunting and foodgathering peoples of the pre-Neolithic times (before about 6000 B.C.)

The mazzeri are dream-hunters, who go out at night to kill an animal. They recognize in the face of the animal someone known to him, nearly always an inhabitant of his village. The next day he will tell what he has seen and the person mentioned will die in the space of time running from three days to a year, and always within an uneven number of days. If an animal is only wounded by the mazzere, then the person it represents will meet an accident or illness, but not death.

To be a mazzere it is necessary to have a psychic gift that opens the door to the parallel world.

The debaucherous activities were considered a means for individuals to directly voice themselves to the gods, in what seems like a scary, society-wide version of Woodstock 99. Via the Los Angeles Times:

Since 2001, Johns Hopkins University archaeologist Betsy Bryan has led the excavation of the temple complex of the Egyptian goddess Mut in modern-day Luxor, the site of the city of Thebes in ancient Egypt. And the ritual she has uncovered, which centers on binge drinking, thumping music and orgiastic public sex, probably makes “Jersey Shore” look pretty tame.

Bryan, a specialist in Egypt’s New Kingdom (roughly 1600 to 1000 BC), has painstakingly pieced together the details of the Festivals of Drunkenness, which took place in homes, at temples and in makeshift desert shrines throughout ancient Egypt at least once a year.

Bryan [explains], “What’s really distinctive about these rituals is their communal nature, their participatory aspect. The people in attendance were everybody from the highest elites to groups of far more modest members of society.

The disappearances of nearly 40 dogs from southern Idaho is baffling authorities and raising concerns after dogs were found dead under mysterious circumstances, with one found with its head crushed in a suspected ritual killing.

Nearly 40 dogs have been reported missing since November in an agricultural region in south-central Idaho known as the Magic Valley. “The dogs seem to vanish into thin air,” said animal shelter director Debbie Blackwood.

Authorities grew even more concerned after a German shepherd was found apparently stoned to death earlier this month. Blackwood says the dog appeared to have suffered a “ritualistic execution,” in which its head was crushed with rock and its carcass covered with a purple cloth.

Would you be brave enough to confront the woman in the long skirt? The Washington Post reports:

Police in the Brazilian city of Sao Paulo are baffled by a macabre puzzle: someone has been leaving gift-wrapped human skulls around town.

The first skull in cherry-red wrapping was found on February 20 in a planter near a residential building downtown. Since then, seven others have been found near Mormon temples or consulates, including those for Russia, the Czech Republic and South Africa. The skulls are old, with traces of dirt.

Investigator Paul Henry Bozon Verduraz Verduraz says security cameras captured images of a woman in an ankle-length skirt leaving the skulls, which seem old, with traces of dirt. He thinks this may be part of some sort of ritual.

A spot of worship of the Saint of Death, constructed with human body parts found on eBay? NBC News reports:

Some of the bones and a skull found Sunday in a Pasadena backyard are human, the Los Angeles Coroner’s Office has confirmed. A man who left the house Monday said that his sister’s family had found the bones for sale on eBay, and that she purchased them for religious reasons.

Police said they were pursuing a trespasser when they spotted bones atop the outdoor altar. Steer horns and other animal bones were visible, along with the human bones, candles and incense.

Studying images of the statues on the altar, Andrew Chesnut, PhD, a professor at Virginia Commonwealth University and expert on Latin American folk religions, said: “What caught my eye was that [it] was obviously primarily an altar to Santa Muerte, the Saint of Death…whose cult has been mushrooming both in the United States and Mexico over the past decade.”

The whole language of football is involved in sexual allusions. We were told to go out and “fuck those guys”; to take that ball and “stick it up their asses” or “down their throats.” Over the years I’ve seen many a coach get emotionally aroused while he was diagramming a particular play into an imaginary hole on the blackboard. His face red, his voice rising, he would show the ball carrier how he wanted him to “stick it in the hole.”

It is highly likely that the ritual aspect of football, providing as it does a socially sanctioned framework for male body contact…is a form of homosexual behavior.